


Goes Ever On

by vextant



Series: Happy Steve Bingo 2018 Fills [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst is very Minor, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bathing/Washing, Gen, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Pre-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Steve Rogers's Motorcycle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-12 11:30:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16872139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vextant/pseuds/vextant
Summary: Steve settles himself on the parking garage floor with toothbrush and WD-40 in hand. At first he sort of regrets not thinking to bring a radio, but soon enough he gets so lost in cleaning the new bike that he doesn’t even notice the silence.Doesn’t even notice the footsteps.—A fill for "Bathing/Washing" for the Happy Steve Bingo 2018.





	Goes Ever On

 

Steve washes his bike for the first time on a Wednesday afternoon. He picks an obscure corner of the Complex’s garage — not the Avengers’ garage, where Tony’s Audi collection and Bruce’s Chevy Cruze both live, no, Steve’s hidden himself away in one of the support staff garages on a relatively empty level. 

Cleaning a bike is nothing like washing a car. For the most part, Steve knows that you can clean modern cars in the same set of steps you’d wash your dishes with: hot water, hot soapy water, cold water rinse, dry. He’s sure that a lot of people cut it down to soap-and-then-dry, if they do it themselves at all. Bikes don’t work like that. For one thing, the engine’s almost entirely exposed, so just tossing a bucket of water at it wouldn’t work out all that well. Cleaning a bike is more intimate — and Steve is fully aware that he’s biased on this — but it  _ is _ because you’ve got to go through it component by component. You’ve got to trust that you know what you’re doing.

He learned the first step himself, the hard way, in late 1943 when the SSR sent him off on a standard-issue 42WLA for the first time —  _ let the bike cool first _ . Even if you’ve just ridden up the wettest, muddiest mountain road that the Italian Alps have to offer, water on a hot engine is not going to do anybody any good. Steve parked the Honda in this garage on the way back from Vermont four days ago. It’s not like the security team monitoring the cams would recognize him out of uniform anyway, and he’s very confident that no one would match this little bike and Captain America together, because this isn’t Captain America’s bike. It’s not overpowered, big, or ostentatious in any way.

It’s just Steve’s, and he loves it. 

He’s got two buckets with him, one with all his supplies — a toothbrush, a couple of towels, a can of WD-40, a sponge, and a bottle of wax — and one with soapy water.

Next step is to clean the chain. That’s what the toothbrush and WD-40 are for, to get the Vermont dirt and whatever leftover grease is on it. It’s going to splatter everywhere, which is why you always scrub the chain first before cleaning anything else. 

Steve settles himself on the parking garage floor with toothbrush and WD-40 in hand. At first he sort of regrets not thinking to bring a radio, but soon enough he gets so lost in the task that he doesn’t even notice the silence. 

Doesn’t even notice the footsteps. 

“This is the new baby?”

The sudden voice startles him into nearly dropping the mucky toothbrush in his lap. Steve peeks up over the seat to see Tony watching him through designer not-sunglasses, with his hands in his pants pockets. He looks smug. 

“ _ Old _ baby, I should say, Jesus Cap, you leave for a few days and come back with another pensioner.”

Steve sighs and keeps working his way down the chain. He’s known Tony long enough to have a strategy: don’t engage, wait for the storm to blow itself out. With enough luck, he’ll get bored and move on quickly. 

“How old is it, anyway? Bet it was made in what, ‘68, ‘69? Yeesh, you really think we need a baby boomer around here—?”

“It was ‘75.” Steve growls before he can help it. He takes a deep breath to himself, and glares at Tony over the seat. “Built in ‘75, restored in 2008.”

Tony scoffs. “You call this  _ restored _ ? How many cc’s does it even have?  _ Three _ ? I could do a better job in my sleep. “

“Well,  _ don’t _ .”

It’s sharp enough that Tony actually stops to consider the scene. He holds up his hands in defeat — or at least the Stark version of defeat, which is usually more along the lines of  _ I’m not done, I’ll just bring this up later _ . Then he jumps right back into it, “You know, Cap, my nanny used to have a saying — ‘secrets, secrets are no fun, unless they’re shared with everyone’.”

“Yeah, look who’s talking.” Steve’s really not joking around now, he can feel the anger boiling in his chest as his heartrate kicks up. 

“Hey, look, this isn’t about me—”

“What the hell  _ else _ could it possibly be about?”

“— _ I _ came to find  _ you _ —”

“Yeah, you just  _ can’t help _ sticking your nose in things.”

Tony scoffs and crosses his arms, “Jesus Christ, Cap, I just wanted to see the new bike. I didn’t know you were building up your collection.”

“It’s not a collection.” Steve shifts from sitting to kneeling in order to better work his way down the chain. He knows it’s probably not worth it to try and explain to Tony, mostly because it means putting it in words in the first place. He doesn’t want to fight, he just wants to finish washing the bike and put it away. Preferably, Tony would’ve never know at all, because if he did then this conversation was inevitable. “Those two are different. This isn’t a Cap bike.”

“Yeah, I can see that.” Tony’s voice isn’t as heated anymore, and even though Steve’s not really looking at him, he can still see his posture relax a little bit. “It looks like it’d fall apart if you even thought about off-roading.”

“Who told you?” Steve wipes his hands and stands protectively over the bike. He knows it couldn’t have been Sam, it wouldn’t have been Sam, even though Sam was the only one who knew. Tony must’ve gone digging. He always does when there’s something he doesn’t know. It’s the worst kind of bloodhound, the kind that’s a computer engineer who personally invented the phone in Steve’s pocket — which he pointedly did  _ not _ bring with him to Vermont. 

“HR gets pinged every time one of us takes out more than a thousand in cash.”

The way Tony casually says it makes Steve’s blood boil, but it’s not as bad as the reminder. They’re always being watched, weighed, evaluated — there are any number of social and political forces in this country alone that are waiting for the slightest misstep, the slightest indication that the Avengers are not worthy of trying to do good in the world. The Avengers have a human resources department, because the Avengers are legally a privately-owned, privately-funded corporation — on paper, Steve and Tony and the rest of the team are the board of directors. Nick Fury and the S.H.I.E.L.D. influence are “consultancies”. Words like accountability are thrown around a lot. The U.S. Government is pretty much convinced that they’re a bunch of misbehaving children rather than grown adults who just want to help and have the capacity to do so better than most. Supposedly, this company structure is meant to protect them. Steve thinks that while it might be better to watched by their own people, it’s infuriating that they have to be watched at all. 

Steve doesn’t answer. He watches Tony’s face for a hint of how  _ he _ feels about all this, but Tony’s just looking down at the bike. “You’re at least going to repaint it, right?”

“No.” 

“Oh, come  _ on _ , you’re just going to keep it like this?”

“I bought it as-is because I like it as-is.”

Tony huffs. It’s not entirely a concession. And then, of all things, he reaches out to touch the handlebar. Steve can watch the engineer at work in his head as he appraises the whole machine — the switches, the indicators, light, engine, pipes, chain, tires. Tony takes it in one by one and then sort of steps back for the bigger picture. It takes him a whole half a minute — which must work out to be  _ years _ in Stark time — to look back at Steve. “Do I at least get to hear it go?”

Steve recognizes the olive branch for what it is. He pulls a sponge out of one of his buckets and offers to toss it. “You can if you help me clean it first.”

With a grin, Tony starts to roll up his sport coat sleeves. “Alright, are we going for military clean or just not-dirty?”

“I was gonna go for showroom clean.” Steve chuckles a little and tosses the sponge at him. “Might help to take the jacket off altogether.”

“You’re probably right.” Tony sheds it and lays it over the wall looking out over the Complex grounds. Before Steve can even process what he said, Tony wiggles his first finger at him. “Don’t tell anybody I said that.”

“I  _ can _ keep a secret, you know.” Steve sinks back to the ground and sprays the next section of chain before scrubbing it. Tony just laughs and tugs the bucket of soap water to his side of the bike. 

In a perfect world, Steve thinks that he and Tony would have the same sort of reverence for motorcycles. The reality of course is that this just isn’t true; they have different kinds of appreciation, each respecting the machines in their own way. Tony, as with most things, is attracted to the performance — the engine size, thrust, torque, aerodynamics. The parts, the stats, the things an engineer would see. 

Steve can understand that, can see that a little bit — he certainly knows his way around the vocabulary, can fix up pretty any issue on the 42WLAs — but he likes the utility of them better. Bikes are useful, narrower and easier to handle than cars. More intimate. There’s nothing between you and the road except your foot pegs and boot soles. He doesn’t have the knack for pure numbers or the data-bank brain that Tony has. 

He watches Tony carefully scrub the front end of the bike from the top down, starting with the handlebars. It’s gentle, the way that Tony cares for Iron Man, the way that he takes care of Dum-E and U, the way he looks after his own machines. Steve is honestly grateful that there wasn’t more of an argument — he was half-expecting Tony to physically fight him for the right to update the little Honda. But there wasn’t. 

There’s a lot the two of them don’t say to each other. For as much as they miscommunicate and disagree, Steve knows that there’s common ground there. They’re both stubborn bastards, for one. Most of the issues between them stem from that. But right here and now —  _ for once _ — they agree on something, and neither of them needs to say anything about it. It’s mutually understood. 

Steve knows that Tony might not exactly  _ like _ this bike, but he thinks Tony understands why he wanted it. It’s a simple thing, a very basic model. They both crave simplicity, just in their own ways. They can at least agree on that. 

**Author's Note:**

> Snatched the title from the famous Tolkien poem, since I needed a good road-related title. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
